Semantic Descriptions of Web Services

Abstract

This chapter introduces the emerging technology of Semantic Web services. It concentrates on two dominant specifications in this domain, namely OWL-S (Web ontology language for services) and WSMO (Web services modeling ontology). We briefly introduce Web services and Semantic Web, two main technologies underlying the Semantic Web services technology and then explain most of the key features of this technology together with simplified examples. We discuss three aspects of Semantic Web services: specifications for semantic descriptions of services, intelligent discovery and selection of services using semantic descriptions, and finally, building more complex services by composing existing ones. Our main goal in this chapter is not only to present an abstract view of this technology but also the introduction of the technical details of the two existing specifications.